Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

MARK RUFFALO WAS STILL IN HIS ROMANTIC LEAD PERIOD when I took these portraits - five years before his first appearance as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. This makes me wonder if I'd ever have a chance of taking his portrait today, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has changed the ordering of the star system so completely.

I'd been seeing Ruffalo in a lot of films while I was at the free daily, doing film and DVD reviewing among my many other duties. He was having a good career - his filmography is pretty thick, but I mostly remembered him for his role in the erotic thriller In The Cut, co-starring with Meg Ryan. It was notable for some somewhat graphic sex scenes, and in retrospect it was the moment when their career paths crossed - his on the way up, her on the way down from her peak as America's Sweetheart.

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

For his part, Ruffalo didn't seem to have settled on his "photo face" - the expression (or mask, if you will) that many actors and other personalities learn to put on after their first few dozen photo shoots. There's a nice range of expression - something it's always nice to be able to hand in to your editors at the end of the day.

This was my final shoot of the 2007 film festival, as far as I can tell. Another room at the Intercontinental on Bloor, another warm spot of light by a wall; there was, if nothing else, a consistency to the work I did at the time that might be mistaken for a style, if you were feeling generous. I didn't know it at the time but this would be my last big festival for almost a decade, as some big changes were about to take place at the free daily.

Mark Ruffalo, Toronto, Sept. 13, 2007

Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

COMEDIANS HAVE A STRANGE ENERGY. More than any other performer I've photographed - actors, musicians, you name it - comedians (in general - there are, of course, exceptions) have a compulsion to be "on" all the time, to project something at the camera that has the curious effect of revealing very little about themselves.

I can't help but see that happening in this shoot with Simon Pegg, done at the film festival when he was in town promoting his role in Run Fatboy Run. On one hand, shots like the one above, despite its technical shortcomings (sharp focus is overrated, to be honest), telegraph the most basic facts about the subject, or at least those fact that they want known before anything else. He fast; he's funny; he's too much for the camera to capture.

Simon Pegg, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

Nearly every comedian I've shot has this "come out with guns blazing" attitude for a photo shoot, and I can see why some photographers would be happy to work with it, to simply treat the session as a kind of wildlife photography. This isn't very satisfying to me, so I tried to wait Pegg out as he sat in front of me with the window in the suite at the Intercontinental behind me, providing a direct, unbounced north light.

The result was a stand-off; eventually he got tired of making faces, but when he relaxed (sort of) and simply faced my camera, it was hard to push past that hint of defiance in his eyes that seemed to say either "I will not show you what you want to see" or "I have no idea what you expect to see." This stand-off is where most shoots with comics ends for me, unless I have a little more time to wear them out and maybe even boss them around. It's also the reason why I always let out a little inward groan when I learn that I've been assigned to photograph a comedian.

David Schwimmer

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

IT HAD BEEN JUST THREE YEARS SINCE FRIENDS AIRED ITS LAST EPISODE when David Schwimmer arrived at the film festival with his debut film as a director. That would make him a big star, but he was strangely subdued when I photographed him - as low key and eager to please as a young actor here with his first feature.

I understood his reticence; typecasting ruins careers, and after ten years playing Ross Geller, Schwimmer had to manage his next moves carefully to avoid playing high-strung nerds for the rest of his working life. I thought he'd already been terribly brave taking a role on the HBO WW2 miniseries Band of Brothers as the martinet Lt. Sobel, a character likely hated by viewers more than Hitler.

David Schwimmer, Toronto, Sept. 10, 2007

All of this - Schwimmer's uneasy career moment, his unprepossessing attitude that day - made me feel more than usually sympathetic to him as a subject. I'm not saying that I approach every subject as an adversary (though it's not a bad tactic when circumstances demand it) but I had an empathy for Schwimmer at that moment which I rarely feel at a portrait session. Perhaps that was his tactic all along.

Looking over the photos I shot at the 2007 festival, I'm amazed at how much I'd relaxed into the initially difficult lighting I found in the rooms at the Intercontinental on Bloor. There's a flattering softness to the room light that I'd have a hard time replicating in a well-equipped studio. I didn't know it at the time but I was passing through another steep learning curve, a challenge that I neither sought nor imagined when I had a camera put back in my hands just three years earlier.

Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

THERE IS A BASIC - AND CONSIDERABLE - PROBLEM WITH SHOOTING REALLY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. This can be summed up with the maxim that the quality of the photo you take and the skill you've acquired on the way to taking it is largely immaterial, since most people will react to even a mediocre photo of a really beautiful person by saying "Oh, that's lovely."

They're responding more to the subject than the photo, basically, and it might bother other photographers less than it bothers me, but it's perfectly embodied in this shoot I did with actress Monica Bellucci at the film festival in 2007.

It has to be understood that Bellucci isn't merely an attractive actress - there are plenty of those - but one of cinema's Great Beauties: An actress whose beauty has often been the defining characteristic of roles she has played, much as it would have been with previous Great Beauties like Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and others. And as soon as I was given the assignment to photograph Bellucci I felt a wave of panic wash over me.

Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007

I've written about this shoot before but it's worth describing one more time. I showed up at the suite at the Intercontinental for the shoot to discover it was one of the rooms without much in the way of window light, but that a television crew had set up in the space. I politely asked one of the techs if it was possible to use their lights for my shoot as the room's ambient light was far from sufficient (or attractive.) He said yes, and I set up a couple of quartz heads in a crossfire next to a light wall; it wasn't the loveliest light ever, but it was bright and directional and just soft enough and I hoped that I could make it work.

Bellucci showed up with hair and makeup people in tow, and while they had no doubt done their job well, the light I chose was just harsh enough that I have done some considerable Photoshop work to smooth out the original photos. I was desperate to keep my subject looking as neutral as possible - I wanted something at least a little glamorous but I didn't want to encourage her to adopt any of the poses she might have learned over hundreds of previous photo shoots, so I gave her even less direction than I would normally. (Which is to say almost none at all besides "look at me" and "look away.")

The results are stark - I've tried to make them starker with considerable retouching - but still not quite where I'd have got them with a bit more time and preparation. Nonetheless, the shots I posted to this blog nearly three years ago have been shared around online with the expected reaction - look at these beautiful photos of a beautiful woman. Which just confirms my suspicion that a really beautiful subject requires a photographer concerned about their style over just taking glamour photos to work much harder. Mind you, it's a challenge I'm more than happy to accept.

Rosamund Pike

Rosamund Pike, Toronto, Sept. 6. 2007

ROSAMUND PIKE BEGAN HER FILM CAREER AS A BOND GIRL, but unlike many actresses who got their big break with 007 (Daniela Bianchi, say, or Barbara Bach), she managed to thrive despite this distinction. 2007 turned out to be my Bond Girl year, as Pike shared the job in Die Another Day with Halle Berry, who also recovered nicely from the experience.

Pike was at the film festival to promote her starring role in Fugitive Pieces, a Canadian production based on an award-winning novel, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, a local-boy-made-good who went on to direct episodes of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones. Pike would return to Canada a few years later for a role in a movie adaptation of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version; her luck held and her career survived these excursions in the Canadian film industry.

Rosamund Pike, Toronto, Sept. 6. 2007

Pike is one of cinema's current great beauties, an English Rose with actual talent to back up her looks. Whenever I've been assigned to photograph one of these beauties, I feel an uncommon mix of dread and relief. Relief because I know that, as long as the light is good and the camera is focused, I'll like get a photo that most people will call "lovely." Dread because, well, that really isn't enough - beauty is a crutch, and it's hard to make a portrait that's both beautiful and interesting.

I tried to work around Pike's obvious beauty by holding her full center in the frame with the Intercontinental's very tapered light behind me. I gave her more direction than I usually do, but nothing really specific, hoping to catch a few of those "in between" moments that can't be posed. I'm still not sure if I was successful, but I do know with some certainty that I've rarely seen any photos of Pike that look like mine.

Rosamund Pike, Toronto, Sept. 6. 2007

Chris Tucker

Chris Tucker, Toronto, July 17, 2007

I SUPPOSE I PHOTOGRAPHED CHRIS TUCKER IN THE MIDDLE OF A CAREER CRISIS. Perhaps that's why he was a more than usually tense subject, even for a big celebrity. Or perhaps Tucker just isn't very relaxed in front of some random newspaper photographer for whom he's obliged to make faces. I'm pretty sure I might be the same way, were I in his situation.

Tucker was in Toronto promoting the third film in the Rush Hour series. He'd had his breakthrough alongside Ice Cube in Friday, then become a celebrity with three films in 1997 - Money Talks, Jackie Brown and The Fifth Element. The first Rush Hour film was a monster hit, and for the next decade he didn't seem to do much but team up with Jackie Chan for its sequels.

An actor with his status should have probably been working much more often, which is why I interpret this period in his career as a crisis, but knowing the kind of money a hit franchise can generate, perhaps he was simply thinking "Why work if you don't have to?" (But then again, Tucker would end up settling a $2.4 million dollar tax debt seven years after I took these photos, so maybe I was right.)

Chris Tucker, Toronto, July 19, 2007

Technically, this was like much of 2007 - "another shoot, another camera." This time I was testing out the Olympus E-510, which was a bit of a shift in their DSLR line, from a Kodak CCD digital sensor to a Panasonic MOD sensor. Whatever that means, the result was a much more smooth and detailed jpeg than I had been used to working with up till then. It also marked a shift to a fixed 3:4 sized sensor from the more film-like 2:3 aspect ratio.

It has to be noted that digital cameras during this period were evolving pretty quickly, increasing in resolution with each new generation and improving their sensitivity in low light and at higher ISO settings. By contrast, digital photo technology seems to have plateaued a decade later, with only minor improvements being offered with new models.

I was a bit wrongfooted by Tucker's very reserved attitude as a subject, so I just went into a default look for much of this shoot and had him adopt an old Hollywood screen idol kind of pose - the result of which is the frame at the top of this post. The shot at the bottom is the result of looking at the jpegs again for the first time in over a decade and finding something interesting in the unnaturally smooth colour rendition the camera produced; pumping a bit more warmth into the image in Photoshop gave it a quality that I associate more with digital photos than film, where even the most basic portrait (like this one) takes on a plastic, processed quality that lends the image a faint strangeness I wouldn't have seen through the viewfinder.

Iman

Iman, Toronto, May 30, 2007

SHE REALLY, REALLY TALKED A LOT. I mean, a lot; I actually felt sorry for David Bowie at a certain point. I imagined that he didn't get a word in edgewise at home, and had this image of him holding up his finger and saying "Yes, dear - " and "Of course, darling, but..." For the first time in my life I had a reason to imagine David Bowie's home life as an old radio comedy about a retiring, milquetoast husband and his firebrand wife.

Supermodel Iman was in Toronto promoting her role in the Canadian franchise of Project Runway, which was a huge hit at the time and the subject of much coverage in the free daily. I was, of course, more than a bit overawed to be photographing Mrs. Bowie - I can't lie about that - but the prospect of having one of the world's most famous models in front of my camera was also intimidating, and I wondered if it would be possible to get anything where Iman didn't merely slip into studied poses.

Iman, Toronto, May 30, 2007

The shot at the top is very nearly what I imagined I'd get, and much of the shoot - done on the terrace of a penthouse suite in one of the new boutique hotels downtown - is like this: Iman in autopilot, presenting the sort of face that I imagine Peter Beard or Patrick Demarchelier or Richard Avedon would have tolerated for a few frames before imploring her to pretend that she cared.

It was the shot I handed into the free daily, in any case, but going through the shoot years later I noticed the frame just above. There's a bit more happening here - perhaps a bit of impatience coming through: The seasoned model concerned that this rather silent newspaper photographer isn't up to capturing her best face. If I flatter myself, it reminds me of a still from an old Italian movie - Anna Magnani or Gina Lollabrigida building up to a fierce tirade at some hapless male co-star. In any case, my closest brush with fashion's upper echelon.

Harry Shearer

Harry Shearer, Toronto, April 25, 2007

THE FIRST TIME I SAW THIS IS SPINAL TAP, AT A DOWNTOWN MULTIPLEX, a long-haired metalhead dude ahead of me on the escalator after the movie turned to his equally long-haired metalhead buddy and said, "I don't get it - why make a movie about a band that sucks?" Even if the movie wasn't as seminal as it is, this anecdote alone would endear it to me for all time.

Similarly, Harry Shearer would be a legend to me even if he hadn't co-wrote the film and played bassist Derek Smalls. So I was a bit overawed when I got the assignment to do his portrait when he was in town, promoting either A Couple of White Chicks at the Hairdresser (unlikely, as I don't think it was ever released outside the U.S.) or The Simpsons Movie (more likely, though he might have been in town for some completely different reason.)

Harry Shearer, Toronto, April 25, 2007

The assignment was at a hotel I'd never shot in before - the Grand Hotel & Suites at Jarvis and Dundas East, which I remembered from when the building was the RCMP headquarters. We did the shoot in a meeting room on the main floor instead of one of the suites, which probably explains the chair - hyperbole in the form of furniture - and the generous shooting space, not to mention the dismal lighting, from overhead fixtures and pot lights.

The mixed lighting sources means that this shoot is nearly unprintable in colour, so I've rendered these frames in black and white. I've also played with the focus in processing, subtly with the bottom frame, more dramatically in the one at the top, to give the look of a very wide lens with a very, very narrow aperture, or a view camera with the focal plane shifted.

I had my doubts about even posting these photos until after I'd managed - with considerable effort - to correct the shortcomings of the original images. Which is another reason for me to be grateful for the digital revolution.

Giovanni Ribisi

Giovanni Ribisi, Toronto, March 21, 2007

YOU WANT IT DARKER? I must have wanted it darker on the day I photographed Halle Berry and Giovanni Ribisi at the Windsor Arms Hotel, judging by the results. The actors were in town publicizing the film Perfect Stranger; co-star Bruce Willis had obviously been unavailable but I didn't mind as I'd been enjoying Ribisi's work for years by that point, and continue to do so today.

As I explained with the Halle Berry post, I showed up for this shoot with a camera I was reviewing - Sony's a100, the first DSLR in their camera lineup. A prudent photographer would have done some tests to see how it performed in the challenging circumstances of my hotel room shoots, but I didn't. Imagine my shock when I walked into the rooms at the Windsor Arms to be reminded that it was a hotel with tiny windows letting in scant light.

Still, I've shot using available light for so long that, as far as I'm concerned, any light is good light. But the Ribisi shoot wasn't about making do with poor light like the Halle Berry shoot I did the same day - the light I found in the room where I shot Giovanni Ribisi was amazing! Dim, but amazing, which means that I've worked especially hard to make these shots turn out years after they were taken, to overcome the technical limitations of the source image.

Giovanni Ribisi, Toronto, March 21, 2007

As I said before, the Sony a100 didn't perform particularly well in low light. Perhaps if I'd shot RAW in addition to jpeg I might have had something richer to work with, but I've only started shooting uncompressed files recently. (A shameful admission, I know.) With the Halle Berry shoot I was disappointed that I couldn't find a really lovely piece of light and had to improvise, but even though I loved what I was seeing through the viewfinder with Ribisi, I knew I'd have a hell of a time making them workable for newsprint.

This is a case where I was actually taking photos with some future use in mind, beyond the job at hand. I just didn't know that this future use would be this blog. The dim but dramatic side light looked like something from an old issue of Esquire, or a British Sunday weekly magazine in the '60s, and seemed appropriate for Ribisi, who's more like the sort of actors that mixed character with leading man, back when movies were generally more interesting.

The problem was that I was working for a newspaper - I had, in fact, always worked for newsprint publications - where highlights need to pop and really dark shadows just suck up ink. This is probably the biggest disappointment I had to live with for most of my career, and the reason why I've only recently been able to present my work the way I always saw it in my mind - without a client to pay for it, to be sure, but very nearly the way I always wanted it to look.

Giovanni Ribisi, Toronto, March 21, 2007

Halle Berry

Halle Berry, Toronto, March 21, 2007

WHAT AMAZES ME IS THAT THESE PICTURES TURNED OUT AT ALL. I photographed Halle Berry in a room at the Windsor Arms hotel when she was in town doing publicity for Perfect Stranger, a thriller where she co-starred with Bruce Willis. A few years earlier I'd have just been surprised by getting a session with someone like Berry - a real celebrity and movie star, a Bond Girl and the winner of an Academy Award.

But by 2007 I was accustomed to having access - however brief - to some pretty big Hollywood names. I was still wrestling with the challenge of trying to push for something even faintly dramatic in the scant minutes (really seconds) I had with them, so I'm amazed that I chose to walk into a shoot with Berry holding a camera I'd never used before, into a situation where finding decent light had proved to be difficult in the past.

I'd added the role of tech column writer to my list of responsibilities at the free daily, and naturally I liked to review new cameras, like the Sony a100 I was using that day. While there was a bit of accidental synergy happening with this - Perfect Stranger was released by Sony Pictures - I was taking a bit of a risk by trusting the results of my shoot to the first-ever DSLR made by the company.

Halle Berry, Toronto, March 21, 2007

It turned out that the a100 - like quite a few of the early digital SLRs at the time - had a bit of an issue with shooting in low light. And the Windsor Arms, while a luxurious hotel, was notable for its small windows and lack of daylight (especially compared to hotels like the old Four Seasons a block or two away.) I knew as soon as I saw the room that I'd have a lot of work to do in Photoshop.

It wasn't that Berry needed the work. Far from it - she was as lovely in real life as she appeared onscreen. But the light was poor and lacked vibrance or focus, and I was going to lose quite a bit of detail by shooting at ISO 1600. Additionally, the autofocus system on the a100 had a hard time locking onto Berry in the dim room, reducing the number of really usable shots.

There's no shortage of really glamorous photos of someone like Halle Berry out there; I knew that my portraits wouldn't be among them. These shots work - if they work at all - as vaguely arty snapshots of a person who photographs really well, but who knows that her bare minimum in front of a camera will come off so much better than most other people. The technical limitations of my equipment and the shortcomings of the location combined to create what I would have considered at any other time in my career to be an unacceptably narrow window of success.

Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob Thornton, Toronto, Jan.30, 2007

IT WAS NO SECRET THAT BILLY BOB THORNTON COULD BE DIFFICULT. His reputation - founded on a perfectly reasonable distaste for celebrity culture - preceded him, and I knew that my shoot would be short (no surprise - they all were) and that I wouldn't get more out of him than he was willing to give depending on his mood.

Which potentially meant nothing; until I had my camera in my hand and Thornton sitting in front of me in a suite at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, I was prepared to learn that there would be no shoot happening with him at all. With this in mind, I found the best piece of light I could - easier at the Four Seasons than most other hotels - and met his eye briefly, in the hope of establishing the bare minimum of a connection before I began shooting.

Billy Bob Thornton, Toronto, Jan.30, 2007

For many photographers - and a lot of publications - something like this might be enough. As a younger photographer impressed that I came away with anything on a roll of film, I might have been content with it, but Thornton's difficult persona was intriguing, and I wished I'd had the opportunity to get him to express something more than a passive engagement with me and my camera as representatives of the media-celebrity machinery he barely tolerated.

My friend Chris, for instance, had managed to produce a really indelible image of Thornton a few years earlier. It was obviously nothing that I could ever hope or want to reproduce, but I can say with some authority that this was the point in my career's "second act" where I was becoming frustrated with rising to the level of merely inspired competence, just out of reach of situations where I could try to elicit another level from my shoots - a bit more of the "editorial" part of editorial photography.

A FOOTNOTE: I found the image below in the folder for this shoot, right at the top of the sequence of frames. I was testing out cameras for a tech column I was writing for the free daily and the nice people at Olympus had lent me a fisheye lens to go with one of their E-330 DSLRs. I must have put it on the camera and handed it to Chris Atchison, the writer, while we were waiting for Thornton to arrive, and he obviously clicked off this single frame. I have very few photos of me at work; this is one of the few, and a helpful clue to just what movie Thornton was in town promoting.

Waiting for Billy Bob, Four Seasons Yorkville, Toronto, Jan. 30, 2007

William H. Macy

William H. Macy, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

WHENEVER I DESPAIR THAT I'M LIVING THROUGH THE WORST PERIOD FOR POPULAR CULTURE IN A CENTURY, I remember that at least there are actors like William H. Macy working. I noticed him in small parts and was grateful when he turned out to be as good as I suspected he could be when he played desperate, venal, gutless Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. Since then he's joined a short list of actors who inevitably improve even the least promising film with just a cameo or a walk-on.

Macy has been associated with David Mamet since his days studying theatre at Goddard College in Vermont, and developed an acting technique called Practical Aesthetics with the playwright. My scant experience in college theatre only provides the smallest insight into this process-oriented scene technique, but as far as I can tell it breaks motivation down into four steps - the "Literal," the "Want," the "Essential Action" and the "As If." Perhaps one day it might be useful to look into it a bit more to help facilitate the little performances I always hope to elicit from my portrait subjects.

William H. Macy, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

Macy was the third person I had in front of my camera at the film festival promoting the film Bobby, after Joshua Jackson and Emilio Estevez. I initially panicked when I realized that there was no quick way to ask him to take off the glasses hanging around his neck - by the end of the festival, my already brief portrait sessions had become lightning quick. When I realized they weren't going away, I decided to look at them like a character note.

Despite the briefness of the shoot, it seems like I was able to motivate Macy to give a little performance for me, with an actual range of expression and action happening over the quick sequence of frames I shot in that dim room at the Intercontinental on Bloor. Since I'd photographed his wife, actress Felicity Huffman, almost precisely a year earlier at the festival, it seems I've ended up with portraits of a legendary acting couple, shot in circumstances that almost make them a matching pair.

William H. Macy, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

Emilio Estevez

Emilio Estevez, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

THE HARDEST PART OF TAKING PHOTOS OF EMILIO ESTEVEZ WAS NOT TALKING ABOUT REPO MAN. He looked tense - not surprisingly, since making Bobby, the film he was at the festival to promote, would almost bankrupt him. It showed on his face, and in his body language, and it seemed a very bad time to bring up how much I loved his breakthrough role twenty-two years earlier as Otto, the punk who teams up with Harry Dean Stanton to repossess cars.

It was an important film during the listless, halcyon summer just after I'd dropped out of college, alongside Apocalypse Now, which (probably not coincidentally) starred Estevez' father, Martin Sheen. I've lost track of how many times I watched both films that year - often high when I did. When I wasn't watching Estevez and Stanton trade what seemed like classic dialogue ("Look at those people over there. Ordinary fucking assholes. I hate 'em"), I was listening to the soundtrack album, full of L.A. punk and hardcore. I would have loved to have talked about all of this with Estevez, but I could tell in my gut that it really wasn't the right time.

Emilio Estevez, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

With all my personal history about Estevez, I'm sure I entered the room with a few ideas of what I'd like him to do, but they all got thrown away as soon as I picked up on my subject's mood - not unfriendly, but definitely nothing like playful or open to suggestion. It was probably for the best - the style I was slowly working towards during my time at the free daily was very stark and formal, and while I would have loved to make at least a few feints in another direction, it felt like the appropriate approach to take with Estevez.

These are not portraits of a relaxed man. I guess that makes them honest, but I certainly didn't have to try hard to capture my subject's mood. While Bobby didn't end up making back its budget, Estevez has continued to write and direct, and recently worked with his father again on The Way, a film about a man dealing with the death of his son (psychoanalyze that in the light of Sheen's relationship with his other son, Charlie Sheen) by walking the Camino de Santiago, the Catholic pilgrimage route through France and Spain. It's not a bad film, with an unfashionably serious view on spiritual redemption, and if I photographed Estevez today, it might have made for a better icebreaker than my drug-addled memories of Repo Man.

Joshua Jackson

Joshua Jackson, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

THE FILM THAT BROUGHT JOSHUA JACKSON TO THE FILM FESTIVAL is only twelve years old, but it's already a snapshot of another time. Bobby was a star-studded ensemble picture about the day that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, directed by Emilio Estevez (more of him tomorrow) and starring Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Helen Hunt, Laurence Fishburne, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Shia LaBoeuf, William H. Macy (another future post), Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Harry Belafonte, Heather Graham, Christian Slater, Estevez' father, Martin Sheen - and Joshua Jackson, Canadian-born and exactly the sort of local-boy-made-good that the film festival loves to host.

The film was produced by Harvey Weinstein, and was only the latest in a long line of Kennedy hagiographies that Hollywood seemed contractually obliged to produce - at least until Chappaquiddick came out this year. Of all the Kennedys, RFK's reputation is the least tarnished by time, but the film wasn't a success, either critically or at the box office. Kennedy fatigue is palpable now, but it seems like it might have been building for at least a decade.

Joshua Jackson, Toronto, Sept. 14, 2006

Jackson was a celebrity, but I knew almost nothing about him - five years on a hit TV show will make your reputation, but it was still possible in 2006 for a pop culture refusenik like myself to live in passive indifference, even to a multiple nominee of the Teen Choice Awards.

Yes, I'm being irreverent, mostly to avoid saying that I don't remember much about this shoot - not even where it was shot (though I suspect it was the Intercontinental on Bloor.) The metadata on the jpegs I shot that morning tell me this was done bright and early, so Jackson might have been fresh, at the start of a press day. I did what I knew worked and got in tight with my 35mm lens; it delivered one good head shot and another decent candid frame of Jackson, likely talking to a publicist or Chris, the writer. That sort of thing usually doesn't work, but there's enough intensity in his expression here to make it worthwhile.

Tim Robbins

Tim Robbins, Sept. 12, 2006

FIRST, LET ME SAY THAT I DIDN'T ASK TIM ROBBINS TO PUT ON THE TINTED SHADES, and I don't think I asked him to take them off. I give very few directions during a portrait shoot, and I know I would never discourage anyone from adding such a colourful - and unusual - accessory to a shot.

You know you're getting old when you watch an actor go from playing the callow youth (Nuke in Bull Durham) to the authority figure (Senator Hammond in Green Lantern.) Robbins' career has spanned most of my own, which had occasionally involved writing about movies, and while I've never regarded him as a peer, I've certainly regarded his work as up front in the cultural narrative I've been following as more than a spectator, starting with Robbins' role in Robert Altman's The Player.

Tim Robbins, Sept. 12, 2006

Robbins is an actor who likes to play the heavy, and he was at the film festival for Catch A Fire, playing a police torturer in apartheid South Africa. (I've never seen the film but I don't envy any actor trying to do a role with a South African accent - it's one of the hardest to nail.) While I certainly don't share his politics, I have a lot of respect for his choice of roles and apparent unwillingness to relax into an onscreen persona.

Perhaps this is why I felt more relaxed than I usually do when I photograph a big name, and once I found the nice light in the press suite at the old Four Seasons (usually an easy job) I took got up close and let my camera study Robbins' face. As I said before, my directions were minimal - little more than "look at me" and "look away." I might have asked him to close his eyes, but that's not usually something I tell people to do unless I think I've gotten what I want and think I can afford to "waste" a frame. (Nobody - and certainly not mass market newsprint like the free daily - prints portraits of celebrities with their eyes closed. That's just my little obsession.)

Tim Robbins, Sept. 12, 2006

Zach Braff

Zach Braff, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

WHILE RESEARCHING THIS POST, I LEARNED THAT ZACH BRAFF HAS OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER. This is not the sort of information about a living celebrity that would have been anywhere in their biography when I was a boy; I am not certain, in fact, that I would have known what OCD was before I was in my thirties. Knowing it now, however, makes me retroactively apply the information to my (scant) memory of this shoot.

Braff was nervous. I don't know why - it was the end of a press day and I can't have been his only photo shoot and, besides, Scrubs had made him a star five years earlier and he should have been at least a bit at ease in front of cameras by then. But he wasn't. His immediate urge was to mug, but I'd had enough of that at the festival by that point, so I did my best to try and channel his urge to make faces into something a little more focused.

Zach Braff, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

The light was terrible. I'm not even sure there was a daylight window in the room where I was shooting; the colour files are certainly a mess for colour temperature, which - now, years after I took these photos, and with much more experience in Photoshop than I had at the time - means abandoning realistic colour and playing with the sliders until something interesting happens. Or converting to black and white.

Braff was at the festival to promote The Last Kiss, a film he'd co-written (with Paul Haggis) in addition to starring in, alongside Rachel Bilson and Jacinda Barrett. Braff's career is full of multiple credits on films, writing, directing and producing in addition to acting. (He even produced the soundtrack compilation of his film Garden State a couple of years previously.) I imagine that being OCD would probably be an advantage for someone exercising that much control over a project, but this is a level of psychoanalyzing that I'm only tempted to do with shoots like this, where I never really clicked with my subject.

Jacinda Barrett

Jacinda Barrett, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

IT WAS A BUSY MONDAY, AND IN MY MEMORY IT WAS BARELY A MINUTE after Rachel Bilson had left the hotel room before Jacinda Barrett walked in and introduced herself. Chris, the writer, and I must have visibly reacted because the first words out of her mouth were:

"Yeah, I know - tall, right?"

Indeed, she was tall where Bilson had been tiny - an Australian and a former model who had become famous as part of the cast of MTV's Real World: London ten years previous and turned that into a springboard for a movie career. There had been a few small films and a couple of slasher pics before she landed a prestige role supporting Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman in the movie adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain.

Jacinda Barrett, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

That was followed by the Bridget Jones sequel and Wolfgang Petersen's remake of The Poseidon Adventure before the film that brought her to Toronto on this day - a remake of an Italian romantic comedy directed by her co-star Zach Braff, with Bilson making up the third leg of a triangle. Since I was already in place to take a photo, it was a simple matter of having Barrett step into the spot where Bilson had just stood for a quick portrait shoot.

Her model's training made Barrett even more at ease in front of the camera, and it didn't take much to coax a little performance from her. It was one of those shoots that you knew had worked before it was over. Neither of the shots above would have looked like this when I handed them into the free daily; I would have been asked what was wrong with my camera if the top shot had such a warm ochre cast, and there was no way I could have submitted anything in black and white.

Bilson has continued to have a career in movies and on TV, where she recently had the lead role in Bloodline, a Netflix series. She also played a recurring character in Suits, alongside her husband Gabriel Macht, which burnished her celebrity status by putting the couple on the guest list for the recent royal wedding.

Rachel Bilson

Rachel Bilson, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

I HAD NEVER BEEN CLOSER TO MAINSTREAM ENTERTAINMENT CULTURE IN MY CAREER than in my years at the free daily. I was not - still am not - a very mainstream person by taste or inclination, so I often needed someone to explain to me just why the person I was about to photograph was a big deal. For that, I relied either on Tina, the paper's entertainment editor, or Chris, the writer with whom I worked for much of my time at the free daily.

I had heard of Rachel Bilson while writing the daily TV column for the paper, but since the vehicle that made her famous was a prime time soap, I had never seen an episode and had no idea what she looked like. The young woman who walked into the hotel room at the Intercontinental where I did this shoot was best described as pixie-like - tiny, and with huge eyes only slightly emphasized by the makeup person in close attendance.

Rachel Bilson, Toronto, Sept. 11, 2006

As I've written here before, it's hardly a challenge to get a decent photo out of a photogenic person - someone whose livelihood, in fact, springs from their camera-friendly appearance - who is years past sitting down in front of a photographer and apologizing for feeling awkward. Bilson - whose family worked in the movie industry, and whose Los Angeles high school classmates included Kirsten Dunst and Remi Malek - had likely never been at liberty to use that excuse.

Looking at these photos from over a decade's remove - during which Ms. Bilson has starred in her own series, had a child, ended a relationship with another big name actor and prepared to debut another TV series - I can't help but think that my photos of Rachel Bilson are slightly anthropological in nature.

This young woman was very much a creature of Hollywood, and my portraits of her aren't dissimilar to pictures I might have taken of some rare, semi-tame but wholly exotic subject. She probably wouldn't have been put in front of a photographer without wardrobe, a stylist and a small team of handlers to approve setups, but she was at a film festival promoting her first starring role in a movie, so the usual apparatus had been put away for the moment, in the interest of propagating publicity.